Get newest version with Bash

version-detector.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Portable script (Linux, Mac/BSD) to detect the folder with the newest version.

# Assume:
# We have a folder structure like this:
#
#    /path/to/my_program/my-program-0.1.0/
#    /path/to/my_program/my-program-0.5.0/
#    /path/to/my_program/my-program-0.10.0/
#    /path/to/my_program/my-program-1.0.0/
#    ...
#
# Objective:
# We want to detect the folder with the newest version of our program.
# For example to start the newest version.

APP_HOME_BASE="/path/to/my_program"

# List only directories, sort them in numeric order, retrieve the first line, remove the trailing slash
LATEST_APP_HOME=`cd $APP_HOME_BASE && ls -d */ | sort --reverse --numeric-sort | head -n 1 | cut -d'/' -f1`

$LATEST_APP_HOME/bin/start-my_program